No Power in the 'Verse
by alliterator
Summary: She’s still haunted by her dreams.


Title: No Power in the 'Verse  
Author: alliterator  
Summary: She's still haunted by her dreams.  
Spoilers: Up to "War Stories"  
Disclaimer: River, Simon, et al, belong to Joss Whedon, Tim Minear, and Mutant Enemy.  
Author's Note: Usually, I write Buffy fanfiction, as I am a fanatic about that show, but the last two episodes of Firefly have so blown me away that I decided I had to write one about Firefly.

Every night she wakes up, skin drenched in sweat, gasping for breath. Every night she tries to escape from the dreams. The dreams of the men in gloves, of the sharp metal things, of the color blue, of the blackest of rooms. When she wakes up, she knows that they were only dreams. The medication allows her to know this, but she also knows that before her brother took her away, they weren't dreams. They were real.

When she wakes, she's quiet. She doesn't want to wake Simon, there's no need for him to know about her dreams. There's no need to worry him over things that are not real. But they are real, her mind tells her. They are real and they are coming.

Sometimes she sleepwalks. She'll wake up sometimes in the engine room, with the sound of the engine turning and whirling. Sometimes she wishes that she'll never wake up and the night will take her. But that was before the medication. Now she wishes that she could never sleep. But she has to sleep sometimes.

"Go to bed, little mei-mei," Simon will say to her and he'll pull the sheets around her and she'll feel safe. But she doesn't sleep. When he goes to his bunk, she pulls off the covers and reaches for a pen and notebook that she stole from him. She writes in it with a strange urgency, like she knows she only has a small amount of time left. She writes different things, poems sometimes, letters to her parents, to Simon. She still knows the code she used to contact him. She uses it in her poems and in her letters. Her poems are always chaotic, but when you see the code, they become neat and all the words fall into place. Her letters are touching and beautiful, but she never gives them to Simon. He'll read them when it's time, she says to herself. When I'm dead, he'll read them.

The poems and letters do not occupy enough of her time though, and to avoid going to sleep, she wonders. Down corridors and through hatches, she sees _Serenity through peculiar eyes._

As she passes through the cargo hold, she sees the box in which Simon smuggled her out in. She goes over to it and feels the edges, made from a cold alloy. _Steel... density .004... grade metal B. She reaches inside and remembers._

Hoisting herself up, she pulls herself into the box, more like a crate really. She turns, feeling the sides, and sits down. She rolls on her side, pulls up into a fetal position, and sleeps.

She tries not the dream. Sometimes it works and her nights are spent with a void. She likes to press the eyes and see the display of fireworks inside her eyelids when that happens. Tonight it not one of those nights.

_Serenity is docked on Niska's space station. Kaylee is hiding behind the bulkhead, scared, and Niska's men are fast approaching. River quickly takes the gun from Kaylee's shaking hand and waves it around, not looking at where it points. She closes her eyes and squeezes the trigger three times. Her eyes flicker open and she sees the henchmen lying dead. Kaylee looks at her frightened at what she just saw. "No power in the 'verse can stop me," River says, echoing Kaylee's words. She closes her eyes again and squeezes the trigger one more time. When she opens them, Kaylee lays there, blood running down her face, a neat hole in her head._

She wakes, startled and a bit confused at where she is, then she remembers.

"River! River!" Simon calls out to her. He finds her sitting on the floor next to the box, crying. He asks her what's the matter and she looks up at him, her face streaked with tears.

"Nothing," she replies and goes to her room. She takes her diary and opens it to the last page. In it she writes 'NO POWER IN THE 'VERSE CAN STOP ME'. Then she sits on her bunk and cries, the tears making the page wet.

That night she wonders in the engine room. Kaylee, exuberant, had pointed out all the modifications she had made to the engine to make it run more efficiently. There was a large power wire running through the ceiling, shielded by an inch of thick metal. Kaylee had said it was the main power line, where the energy made from the engine went to life support and the artificial gravity inducers and all the other systems that make _Serenity function. Without the metal, Kaylee said putting her hand up against the humming alloy on the ceiling, anyone who touched it would be fried to a crisp._

River runs her hand along the metal, her fingers vibrating along with it. She looks at the open spot, where the power line is partially exposed. She found it two nights ago and she goes there when she is depressed. She knows that if she were to touch it, she would die. Tonight she comes close. Fingers inches away from the wire, she suddenly remembers Simon. He rescued her; if she killed herself, he would be devastated. His rescue would have been in vain and he would sit in his bunk and cry and River doesn't want to make him cry. He's her brave brother and she would rather live then make him cry.

She goes back to her bunk and crawls under the sheets. As she stares at the last page in her book, she wonders about what the saying means. She closes the book and lays her head down, when she sees her hands. In the dark, they look blue.


End file.
